For those of you who don’t know, I enjoy taking photographs. It’s been a hobby for a little over a year now, and I have taken thousands of photos in that time.

I’ve got a gallery that I setup quite some time ago that I have updated regularly with some of my favorite shots. If you would like to look, you can click the link below:

Mike & Jaime’s Photo Gallery

Let me know what you think!

For some reason, I can’t seem to keep from monkeying with the works of any php script I get in my greasy little hands (note: my hands are not really greasy, or little, and my php skills are significantly greater than those of the average monkey).

Take the script that powers this blog, WordPress. All in all, it’s a very nice script. It’s got some features I would never use, but it’s also got some weak points. Sure, it has a nice plugin system so you can add what you need, but is it really a plugin if I have to edit files and manually run sql queries? I don’t think so.

Anyway, I’ve had to hack this blog script a few times in the short period I’ve been using it. This weekend, my blog and Jaime’s Blog were hit by some loser spammer. He is linking to a site about online poker that is pure spiderbait. I really don’t know how he plans on profiting from it– he’s doesn’t even have an affiliate link. I guess he’s hoping to drive a bunch of traffic to the site, and then switch the content into something that will generate revenue. Or maybe he’s just an annoying prick.

He typically posts what appears to be a random line along with a link to his lame site. It’s probably a bot. Sure, WordPress can moderate the comments based on keyword, but I really don’t feel like spending my time denying comments just because some mope decided to add me to his list of people to annoy. So, I made a little hack that does a preg_match on the comments, email address, and website that checks for his domain. If it’s there, he gets forwarded to The FBI. That stopped him for about a week.

Now he’s gotten a bit more resourceful, and has started using trackbacks. Some of you may know what trackbacks are. For those of you who do, you are one step ahead of me. I think I get the basic concept, but I’m not really up to speed on how it works. Well, now comments submitted via trackbacks also run through my keyword module, and if the loser’s domain is listed, he gets an error.

He’ll probably find another way to get his comments posted, and I’ll hack up the code a bit more to shut him down again. What a waste of everyone’s time.